Oct 09 2008

The Chicago Democrats’ dirty little non-secret

Category: corruption,election 2008,Obama,politics,socialism,USAharmonicminer @ 9:13 am

Obama’s political and professional alliance with Bill Ayers, unrepentant terrorist, has not gotten nearly the coverage it deserves in the media.   In what little coverage there is, the story seems to stop at the discusssion of whether Obama knew Ayers well, whether, or when, Obama knew that Ayers was a terrorist, how close the alliance between them was, etc.  These are all important questions, and Obama has given different answers at different times, all evasive.

What’s missing in the discussion is the simple fact that Ayers’ past was well known to the entire Chicago Democrat political machine. Ayers had been given the Citizen of the Year Award by the city of Chicago (read, Mayor Daley) in 1997.  Everyone in the Chicago political machine (in which Obama was a card carrying member) knew all about Ayers.  If Obama didn’t (unbelievable, but just for the sake of argument), everyone around him DID know, and thought it not important enough to mention to Obama.  It reveals all we need to know about the nature of the Chicago political machine, and about what members of that machine thought would matter to Obama.  But, of course, he knew all about it.  It’s just funny that his campaign thinks that claiming he didn’t lets him off the hook.

This tells us a few things.

The CULTURE of Chicago Democrat machine politics is radical to its core.  Can you imagine, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma giving a Citizen of the Year Award to an unrepentant terrorist who said, “We didn’t do enough.”?  (After all, Ayers only tried to blow up government buildings in other cities…  it would be different if he’d tried to blow up something in Chicago.)  This tells us that Obama is a favorite son of, honestly, a pretty sick political machine.

Obama made his political bones IN that culture, by being a good member of it, agreeing with its principles and procedures, etc.  Obama had no problems with it, never fought it, was never a “maverick” or a “unifier” across party lines, etc.  He was always, first and foremost, a party man, in a city where that party was seriously bent and famously corrupt.

A President Obama is all too likely, especially with a Democrat Senate doing the approvals, to appoint radical, radical people in important jobs.  It would be bad enough for him to recycle political hacks from the Clinton or Carter administrations.  But there is every chance that he will appoint a Secretary of Defense whose main impulse is to build DOWN the military, saddle it with impossible rules of engagement, use it as a further testing ground for all kinds of social engineering, etc., with military effectiveness being the last consideration.  His Secretary of State will have the happy job of giving away the store.  His Secretary of the Treasury (not likely to be Warren Buffet, despite the last debate), will probably help guarantee there is little store to give away.  I don’t even want to think what his other appointments would be like, but former ACORN membership is probably the least of our problems.

And given his union commitments, and his obvious willingness to play political hardball, there is no chance that he and a Democrat Congress won’t enact a “fairness doctrine” that will attempt to cripple Right leaning talk radio, and an end to secret union balloting, that will allow unions to pressure individuals to vote the union’s way.

Make no mistake.  This isn’t just a little gerrymandering to jigger the voting districts favorably.  The Left plans to permanently alter the face of American politics by creating such structural imbalances in the system that the center-Right can never catch up.  If they can make enough people dependent on government for their daily bread, and silence the rest, the game is over, and the American experiment in constitutional republican democracy will be finished, even if it continues in name.

And it will have come out of Chicago’s political machine, where more murders were committed in the last 6 months than the death rate of American soldiers in Baghdad in the same timeframe.  I’m sure they’ll do a wonderful job of running the nation.

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Oct 08 2008

Obama the radical socialist. Literally true, it seems.

Category: election 2008,Obama,politics,socialismharmonicminer @ 10:16 pm

Many of us have commented that many of Obama’s policies and plans are essentially socialist, whether his campaign likes the term or not. However, I didn’t know that Obama had literally been a member of a socialist political organization in the 1990s until I read this article at Power Line. Here’s a teaser, but you should really read the entire article at Powerline (which includes archived web pages showing Obama’s relationship to the socialist “New Party”), then return here for my doubtless brilliant comments.

In June sources released information that during his campaign for the State Senate in Illinois, Barack Obama was endorsed by an organization known as the Chicago “New Party”. The ‘New Party’ was a political party established by the Democratic Socialists of America (the DSA) to push forth the socialist principles of the DSA by focusing on winnable elections at a local level and spreading the Socialist movement upwards. …

After allegations surfaced in early summer over the ‘New Party’s’ endorsement of Obama, the Obama campaign along with the remnants of the New Party and Democratic Socialists of America claimed that Obama was never a member of either organization. The DSA and ‘New Party’ then systematically attempted to cover up any ties between Obama and the Socialist Organizations. However, it now appears that Barack Obama was indeed a certified and acknowledged member of the DSA’s New Party.

On Tuesday, I discovered a web page that had been scrubbed from the New Party’s website. The web page which was published in October 1996, was an internet newsletter update on that years congressional races. Although the web page was deleted from the New Party’s website, the non-profit Internet Archive Organization had archived the page.

Powerline thinks it is inconceivable that the American people would elect a socialist President.

Sadly, I don’t.  That has been the trendline in the Democrat Party for decades, and we now have two radical Leftists leading the Senate and the House.  The energy in the Democrat Party has been on the Left for a long time, not anywhere near the “moderate center”.  The Democratic Leadership Council (nominally moderate, though its members all vote in lockstep with the Left) is moribund, energy-wise.  If Obama wins, it will be due to organizations like ACORN and the DailyKos/Soros crowd, combined with the racial politics of the NAACP and others.

It is no secret that Hamas essentially endorses Obama.  Shoot, the Communist Party USA endorses him.  The nominal opposite of the Communist Party USA (if you buy into the far left/far right dichotomy between Communists and Nazis), the Nazi Party, is no fan of McCain/Palin.  Check their site.  They don’t like anyone who supports Israel.  They call Palin a liar on their site.

The point?  This is not a case of the far Lefties endorsing the candidate closest to them on the political spectrum, with the same thing happening on the Right.  This is a matter of the far Left recognizing a more-or-less fellow traveler, while the Nazis know that McCain/Palin will be no friend of theirs, in any way, at any time.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the main stream media to pay any attention to this.  Expect the Obama campaign to cry “foul” and “personal attack!” and “politics of personal destruction!” and the like.  But imagine:  what if John McCain had been a member of, say, the KKK or the Nazi party or something similar in the 1990s?  What if he had even been ENDORSED by one of those groups, even if he wasn’t a member?  What if there was a webpage archive showing his relationship to such an organization?

You get the idea.  But the double standard is in full flower.

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Oct 03 2008

Change Through Orchestrated Crisis

In a remarkable article in the American Thinker, James Simpson connects the dots between the various parts of the Left that have contributed to our current financial “crisis”.

In an earlier post, I noted the liberal record of unmitigated legislative disasters, the latest of which is now being played out in the financial markets before our eyes. Before the 1994 Republican takeover, Democrats had sixty years of virtually unbroken power in Congress – with substantial majorities most of the time. Can a group of smart people, studying issue after issue for years on end, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, not come up with a single policy that works? Why are they chronically incapable?

Continue reading “Change Through Orchestrated Crisis”

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Sep 30 2008

Obama endorsement surprise?

Category: election 2008,Obama,politics,socialismsardonicwhiner @ 9:39 am

Read the following, then click here.

By most media accounts Barack Obama’s tour of Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Jordan and Western Europe was a big success. The visits showed his worldwide popularity is very broad and ranges from people in the street, to US military personnel, to heads of state.

Obama’s visit to Iraq, to the regret of Bush and McCain no doubt, revealed that the al-Maliki government supports his timetable for withdrawal. This was a big plus for the Democratic candidate for president.

Continue reading “Obama endorsement surprise?”

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Jun 27 2008

Canadian Healthcare: NOT the model for USA

Category: healthcare,socialismharmonicminer @ 3:31 pm

I wrote earlier on the problems of “universal health care”, or pretty much any heavily regulated or government funded health care scheme, which inevitably leads to rationing. That is, while we can find cases in free market systems where people won’t get care, through no fault of their own, we’re foolish to ignore the fact that in government run systems, which will of necessity be rationed, there will also be people who suffer for lack of care.

Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, David Gratzer gives the lowdown on the Canadian experiment with socialized medical care. Claude Castonguay was perhaps the most powerful driving voice behind Canada’s adoption of government run healthcare.

Castonguay’s evolving view of Canadian health care, however, should weigh heavily on how the candidates think about the issue in this country.

Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform …..

The government followed his advice…. until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.” [emphasis mine]

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance. [emphasis mine]

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It’s as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced. [emphasis mine]

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor. [emphasis mine]

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires’ case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn’t properly filled out a form. At death’s door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

Read the whole thing.

The facts of economic life are these:

1) When governments engage in any form of price fixing, whether it is intervention in the market by fiat, or wholesale takeover of a sector of the economy, shortages will result. Period. No credible economist denies this. But politicians, or populist/progressive politicians, at any rate, would like to pretend that they can repeal the laws of economics whenever they think they see a good reason (that is, one that will help them get elected or stay in office).

2) No one, absolutely no one, nor any conceivable consortium of geniuses, is able to centrally plan a health care system that is more humane, supplying more health care to more people in a timely way, than the one now in the USA. The very best in the world have tried… and they have failed, pretty much without exception.

3) The US government’s interventions in the health care market, and earlier in wage fixing (in WWII, which led to our entire system of employer provided health insurance, which hid the true costs of health care from the users of it, and, along with Medicare, led directly to our current price spiral), is the single biggest factor in the high health care prices in the USA. But at least we don’t have serious shortages, mostly…. yet.

All of which leads to:

4) The government can only make things worse by further regulation, and most especially by dreaming up more plans that involve taking money from some people in the form of taxes to pay for the health care of others.

As Lazarus Long said (more or less… I didn’t take time to look up the exact quote), “No one ever learns anything from other people’s experience.”

He was wrong, of course, because some people clearly do. But it certainly seems to apply to governments, in spades.

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